Oil Water Separators in Vancouver, British Columbia

Every vehicle wash bay, machine shop, fuel depot and refinery in Canada faces the same line item in its sewer-use bylaw: oil and grease, typically capped somewhere between 15 and 100 mg/L depending on the municipality. An oil water separator is the standard way to meet that cap. It exploits the density difference between oil and water: flow slows inside the vessel, droplets rise and coalesce into a surface layer that gets skimmed, and cleaned water leaves from below.

Two designs, one choice

The choice that matters is between the two main designs. A gravity API separator is a long rectangular basin sized to Stokes' law, built to let droplets of roughly 150 microns and larger rise out. It is robust, tolerant of solids and easy to maintain, which is why refineries still standardize on it. A coalescing-plate separator adds inclined plate packs or oleophilic media that intercept far smaller droplets, down to about 20 to 60 microns, so it reaches better effluent quality in a fraction of the footprint. Our coalescing configurations hold effluent under 10 ppm oil and grease in free-oil service, and many sites pair an API basin with a coalescing polishing stage.

Above-grade, below-grade and API 421

We quote both, in above-grade and below-grade tanks, with API 421 compliant configurations where the specification calls for it. Options include oil-stop valves that close automatically when the oil layer reaches capacity, high-level alarms, and sludge baffles for streams that carry grit. What a separator will not do is remove chemically emulsified or dissolved oil; if your stream carries surfactants from a wash process, we will tell you plainly that you need chemical treatment or flotation ahead of the separator, because selling you a tank that cannot meet your limit helps neither of us.

Sizing from your real flows

Sizing depends on flow rate, droplet size distribution and oil type, which is why the search term oil water separator, at 480 searches a month in Canada, so often ends in a mis-sized purchase from a catalogue. Send us your flow, a recent lab analysis or a description of the process, and your discharge destination. We return a sized configuration, budget price and delivery timeline, reviewed by a process engineer before it reaches you, for any site in Canada. Installation support and commissioning are quoted per project, and replacement plate packs and media remain available for the life of the vessel. Below-grade installations ship with traffic-rated covers where the separator sits in a drive lane, and we keep skimmer parts and alarm components on the shelf so a maintenance call does not become a compliance gap.